Perhaps the first thing to strike us--paradoxical as it may sound to say
so--about the Athenian 'Old Comedy' is its _modernness_. Of its very
nature, satiric drama comes later than Epic and Lyric poetry, Tragedy or
History; Aristophanes follows Homer and Simonides, Sophocles and
Thucydides. Of its essence, it is free from many of the conventions and
restraining influences of earlier forms of literature, and enjoys much of
the liberty of choice of subject and licence of method that marks
present-day conditions of literary production both on and off the stage.
Its very existence presupposes a fuller and bolder intellectual life, a
more advanced and complex city civilization, a keener taste and livelier
faculty of comprehension in the people who appreciate it, than could
anywhere be found at an earlier epoch. Speaking broadly and generally,
the Aristophanic drama has more in common with modern ways of looking at
things, more in common with the conditions of the modern stage,
especially in certain directions--burlesque, extravaganza, musical farce,
and even 'pantomime,' than with the earlier and graver products of the
Greek mind.
The eleven plays, all that have come down to us out of a total of over
forty staged by our author in the course of his long career, deal with
the events of the day, the incidents and personages of contemporary
Athenian city life, playing freely over the surface of things familiar to
the audience and naturally provoking their interest and rousing their
prejudices, dealing with contemporary local gossip, contemporary art and
literature, and above all contemporary politics, domestic and foreign.
All this _farrago_ of miscellaneous subjects is treated in a frank,
uncompromising spirit of criticism and satire, a spirit of broad fun,
side-splitting laughter and reckless high spirits. Whatever lends itself
to ridicule is instantly seized upon; odd, eccentric and degraded
personalities are caricatured, social foibles and vices pilloried,
pomposity and sententiousness in the verses of the poets, particularly
the tragedians, and most particularly in Euripides--the pet aversion and
constant butt of Aristophanes' satire--are parodied. All is fish that
comes to the Comic dramatists net, anything that will raise a laugh is
fair game.
"It is difficult to compare the Aristophanic Comedy to any one form of
modern literature, dramatic or other. It perhaps most resembles what we
now call burlesque; but it had also very much in it of broad farce and
comic opera, and something also (in the hits at the fashions and follies
of the day with which it abounded) of the modern pantomime. But it was
something more, and more important to the Athenian public than any or all
of these could have been. Almost always more or less political, and
sometimes intensely personal, and always with some purpose more or less
important underlying its wildest vagaries and coarsest buffooneries, it
supplied the place of the political journal, the literary review, the
popular caricature and the party pamphlet, of our own times. It combined
the attractions and influence of all these; for its grotesque masks and
elaborate 'spectacle' addressed the eye as strongly as the author's
keenest witticisms did the ear of his audience."[1]
Rollicking, reckless, uproarious fun is the key-note; though a more
serious intention is always latent underneath. Aristophanes was a
strong--sometimes an unscrupulous--partisan; he was an uncompromising
Conservative of the old school, an ardent admirer of the vanishing
aristocratic régime, an anti-Imperialist--'Imperialism' was a
_democratic_ craze at Athens--and never lost an opportunity of throwing
scorn on Cleon the demagogue, his political _bête noïre_ and personal
enemy, Cleon's henchmen of the popular faction, and the War party
generally. Gravity, solemnity, seriousness, are conspicuous by their
absence; even that 'restraint' which is the salient characteristic of
Greek expression in literature no less than in Art, is largely relaxed in
the rough-and-tumble, informal, miscellaneous _modern_ phantasmagoria of
these diverting extravaganzas.
At the same time we must not be misled by the word 'Comedy' to bring
Aristophanes' work into comparison with what we call Comedy now. This is
quite another thing--confined to a representation of incidents of
private, generally polite life, and made up of the intrigues and
entanglements of social and domestic situations. Such a Comedy the Greeks
did produce, but at a date fifty or sixty years subsequent to
Aristophanes' day, and recognized by themselves as belonging to an
entirely different genre. Hence the distinction drawn between 'The Old
Comedy,' of which Cratinus and his younger contemporaries, Eupolis and
Aristophanes, were the leading representatives, and which was at
high-water mark just before and during the course of the great struggle
of the Peloponnesian War, and 'The New Comedy,' a comedy of manners, the
two chief exponents of which were Philemon and Menander, writing after
Athens had fallen under the Macedonian yoke, and politics were excluded
altogether from the stage. Menander's plays in turn were the originals of
those produced by Plautus and Terence at Rome, whose existing Comedies
afford some faint idea of what the lost masterpieces of their Greek
predecessor must have been. Unlike the 'Old,' the 'New Comedy' had no
Chorus and no 'Parabasis.'
This remarkable and distinctive feature, by-the-bye, of the Old Comedy,
the 'Parabasis' to wit, calls for a word of explanation. It was a direct
address on the Author's part to the audience, delivered in verse of a
special metre, generally towards the close of the representation, by the
leader of the Chorus, but expressing the personal opinions and
predilections of the poet, and embodying any remarks upon current topics
and any urgent piece of advice which he was particularly anxious to
insist on. Often it was made the vehicle for special appeal to the
sympathetic consideration of the spectators for the play and its merits.
These 'parabases,' so characteristic of the Aristophanic comedy, are
conceived in the brightest and wittiest vein, and abound in topical
allusions and personal hits that must have constituted them perhaps the
most telling part of the whole performance.
Aristophanes deals with all questions; for him the domain of the Comic
Poet has no limits, his mission is as wide as human nature. It is to
Athens he addresses himself, to the city as a whole; his criticism
embraces morals no less than politics, poetry no less than philosophy; he
does not hesitate to assail the rites and dogmas of Paganism; whatever
affords subject for laughter or vituperation lies within his province;
there he is in his element, scourge in hand, his heart ablaze with
indignation, pitiless, and utterly careless of all social distinctions.
In Politics Aristophanes belongs to the party of the Aristocracy. He
could not do otherwise, seeing that the democratic principle was then
triumphant; Comedy is never laudatory, it lives upon criticism, it must
bite to the quick to win a hearing; its strength, its vital force is
contradiction. Thus the abuses of democracy and demagogy were the most
favourable element possible for the development of Aristophanes' genius,
just because his merciless satire finds more abundant subject-matter
there than under any other form of civil constitution. Then are we
actually to believe that the necessity of his profession as a comic poet
alone drove him into the faction of the malcontents? This would surely be
to wilfully mistake the dignity of character and consistency of
conviction which are to be found underlying all his productions.
Throughout his long career as a dramatist his predilections always remain
the same, as likewise his antipathies, and in many respects the party he
champions so ardently had claims to be regarded as representing the best
interests of the state. It is but just therefore to proclaim
Aristophanes as having deserved well of his country, and to admit the
genuine courage he displayed in attacking before the people the people's
own favourites, assailing in word those who held the sword. To mock at
the folly of a nation that lets itself be cajoled by vain and empty
flatteries, to preach peace to fellow-citizens enamoured of war, was to
fulfil a dangerous rôle, that would never have appealed, we may feel
sure, to a mere vulgar ambition.
Moreover his genius, pre-eminently Greek as it is, has an instinctive
horror of all excesses, and hits out at them wherever he marks their
existence, whether amongst the great or the humble of the earth.
Supposing the Aristocracy, having won the victory the Poet desired, had
fallen in turn into oppression and misgovernment, doubtless Aristophanes
would have lashed its members with his most biting sarcasms. It is just
because Liberty is dear to his heart that he hates government by
Demagogues; he would fain free the city from the despotism of a clique of
wretched intriguers that oppressed her. But at the same time the
Aristocracy favoured by our Author was not such as comes by birth and
privilege, but such as is won and maintained by merit and high service to
the state.
In matters of morality his satires have the same high aims. How should a
corrupted population recover purity, if not by returning to the old
unsullied sources from which earlier generations had drawn their
inspiration? Accordingly we find Aristophanes constantly bringing on the
stage the "men of Marathon," the vigorous generation to which Athens owed
her freedom and her greatness. It is no mere childish commonplace with
our poet, this laudation of a past age; the facts of History prove he was
in the right, all the novelties he condemns were as a matter of fact so
many causes that brought about Athenian decadence. Directly the citizen
receives payment for attending the Assembly, he is no longer a perfectly
free agent in the disposal of his vote; besides, the practice is
equivalent to setting a premium on idleness, and so ruining all proper
activity; a populace maintained by the state loses all energy, falls into
a lethargy and dies. The life of the forum is a formidable solvent of
virtue and vigour; by dint of speechifying, men forget how to act.
Another thing was the introduction of 'the new education,' imported by
'the Sophists,' which substituted for serious studies, definitely limited
and systematically pursued, a crowd of vague and subtle speculations; it
was a mental gymnastic that gave suppleness to the wits, it is true, but
only by corrupting and deteriorating the moral sense, a system that in
the long run was merely destructive. Such, then, was the threefold poison
that was destroying Athenian morality--the triobolus, the noisy
assemblies in the Agora, the doctrines of the Sophists; the antidote was
the recollection of former virtue and past prosperity, which the Poet
systematically revives in contrast with the turpitudes and trivialities
of the present day. There is no turning back the course of history; but
if Aristophanes' efforts have remained abortive, they are not therefore
inglorious. Is the moralist to despair and throw away his pen, because in
so many cases his voice finds no echo?
Again we find Aristophanes' literary views embodying the same good sense
which led him to see the truth in politics and morals. Here likewise it
is not the individual he attacks; his criticism is general. His adversary
is not the individual Euripides, but under his name depraved taste and
the abandonment of that noble simplicity which had produced the
masterpieces of the age of Pericles. Euripides was no ordinary writer,
that is beyond question; but the very excellence of his qualities made
his influence only the more dangerous.
Literary reform is closely connected with moral regeneration, the
decadence of the one being both cause and effect of the deterioration of
the other. The author who should succeed in purifying the public taste
would come near restoring to repute healthy and honest views of life.
Aristophanes essayed the task both by criticism and example--by
criticism, directing the shafts of his ridicule at over-emphasis and
over-subtlety, by example, writing himself in inimitable perfection the
beautiful Attic dialect, which was being enervated and effeminated and
spoiled in the hands of his opponents.
Even the Gods were not spared by the Aristophanic wit and badinage; in
'Plutus,' in 'The Birds,' in 'The Frogs,' we see them very roughly
handled. To wonder at these profane drolleries, however, is to fail
altogether to grasp the privileges of ancient comedy and the very nature
of Athenian society. The Comic Poets exercised unlimited rights of making
fun; we do not read in history of a single one of the class having ever
been called to the bar of justice to answer for the audacity of his
dramatic efforts. The same liberty extended to religious matters; the
Athenian people, keen, delicately organized, quick to see a joke and
loving laughter for its own sake, even when the point told against
themselves, this people of mockers felt convinced the Gods appreciated
raillery just as well as men did. Moreover, the Greeks do not appear to
have had any very strong attachment to Paganism as a matter of dogmatic
belief. To say nothing of the enlightened classes, who saw in this vast
hierarchy of divinities only an ingenious allegory, the populace even was
mainly concerned with the processions and songs and dances, the banquets
and spectacular shows and all the external pomp and splendour of a cult
the magnificence and varied rites of which amused its curiosity. But
serious faith, ardent devotion, dogmatic discussion, is there a trace of
these things? A sensual and poetic type of religion, Paganism was
accepted at Athens only by the imagination, not by the reason; its
ceremonies were duly performed, without any real piety touching the
heart. Thus the audience felt no call to champion the cause of their
deities when held up to ribaldry on the open stage; they left them to
defend themselves--if they could.
Thus Aristophanes, we see, covered the whole field of thought; he
scourged whatever was vicious or ridiculous, whether before the altars of
the Gods, in the schools of the Sophists, or on the Orators' platform.
But the wider the duty he undertook, the harder it became to fulfil this
duty adequately. How satisfy a public made up of so many and such diverse
elements, so sharply contrasted by birth, fortune, education, opinion,
interest? How hold sway over a body of spectators, who were at the same
time judges? To succeed in the task he was bound to be master of all
styles of diction--at one and the same time a dainty poet and a diverting
buffoon. It is just this universality of genius, this combination of the
most eminent and various qualities, that has won Aristophanes a place
apart among satirists; and if it be true to say that well-written works
never die, the style alone of his Comedies would have assured their
immortality.
No writer, indeed, has been more pre-eminent in that simple, clear,
precise, elegant diction that is the peculiar glory of Attic literature,
the brilliant yet concise quality of which the authors of no other Greek
city were quite able to attain. He shows, each in its due turn, vigour
and suppleness of language, he exercises a sure and spontaneous choice of
correct terms, the proper combination of harmonious phrases, he goes
straight to his object, he aims well and hits hard, even when he seems to
be merely grazing the surface. Under his apparent negligence lies
concealed the high perfection of accomplished art. This applies to the
dialogues. In the choruses, Aristophanes speaks the tongue of Pindar and
Sophocles; he follows the footsteps of those two mighty masters of the
choric hymn into the highest regions of poetry; his lyric style is bold,
impetuous, abounding in verve and brilliance, yet without the high-flown
inspiration ever involving a lapse from good taste.
One of the forms in which he is fondest of clothing his conceptions is
allegory; it may truly lie said that the stage of Aristophanes is a
series of caricatures where every idea has taken on a corporeal
presentment and is reproduced under human lineaments. To personify the
abstract notion, to dress it up in the shape of an animated being for its
better comprehension by the public, is in fact a proceeding altogether in
harmony with the customs and conventions of Ancient Comedy. The Comic
Poet never spares us a single detail of everyday life, no matter how
commonplace or degrading; he pushes the materialistic delineation of the
passions and vices to the extreme limit of obscene gesture and the most
cynical shamelessness of word and act.
This scorn of propriety, this unchecked licence of speech, has often been
made a subject of reproach against Aristophanes, and it appears to the
best modern critics that the poet would have been not a whit less
diverting or effective had he respected the dictates of common decency.
But it is only fair, surely, before finally condemning our Author, to
consider whether the times in which he lived, the origin itself of the
Greek Comedy, and the constitution of the audience, do not entitle him at
any rate to claim the benefit of extenuating circumstances. We must not
forget that Comedy owes its birth to those festivals at which Priapus was
adored side by side with Bacchus, and that 'Phallophoria' (carrying the
symbols of generation in procession) still existed as a religious rite at
the date when Aristophanes was composing his plays. Nor must we forget
that theatrical performances were at Athens forbidden pleasures to women
and children. Above all we should take full account of the code of social
custom and morality then prevailing. The Ancients never understood
modesty quite in the same way as our refined modern civilization does;
they spoke of everything without the smallest reticence, and expressions
which would revolt the least squeamish amongst ourselves did not surprise
or shock the most fastidious. We ought not, therefore, to blame too
severely the Comic Poet, who after all was only following in this respect
the habits of his age; and if his pictures are often repulsively bestial,
let us lay most blame to the account of a state of society which deserved
to be painted in such odiously black colours. Doubtless Aristophanes
might have given less Prominence to these cynical representations,
instead of revelling in them, as he really seems to have done; men of
taste and refinement, and there must have been such even among his
audience, would have thought all the better of him! But it was the
populace filled the bulk of the benches, and the populace loved coarse
laughter and filthy words. The Poet supplied what the majority demanded;
he was not the man to sacrifice one of the easiest and surest means of
winning applause and popularity.
Aristophanes enjoyed an ample share of glory in his lifetime, and
posterity has ratified the verdict given by his contemporaries. The
epitaph is well-known which Plato composed for him, after his death: "The
Graces, seeking an imperishable sanctuary, found the soul of
Aristophanes." Such eulogy may appear excessive to one who re-peruses
after the lapse of twenty centuries these pictures of a vanished world.
But if, despite the profound differences of custom, taste and opinion
which separate our own age from that of the Greeks, despite the obscurity
of a host of passages whose especial point lay in their reference to some
topic of the moment, and which inevitably leave us cold at the present
day--if, despite all this, we still feel ourselves carried away, charmed,
diverted, dominated by this dazzling _verve_, these copious outpourings
of imagination, wit and poesy, let us try to realize in thought what must
have been the unbounded pleasure of an Athenian audience listening to one
of our Author's satires. Then every detail was realized, every nuance of
criticism appreciated; every allusion told, and the model was often
actually sitting in the semicircle of the auditorium facing the copy at
that time being presented on the stage. "What a passion of excitement!
What transports of enthusiasm and angry protest! What bursts of
uncontrollable merriment! What thunders of applause! How the Comic Poet
must have felt himself a King, indeed, in presence of these popular
storms which, like the god of the sea, he could arouse and allay at his
good will and pleasure!"[2]
To return for a moment to the coarseness of language so often pointed to
as a blot in Aristophanes. "The great comedian has been censured and
apologized for on this ground, over and over again. His personal
exculpation must always rest upon the fact, that the wildest licence in
which he indulged was not only recognized as permissible, but actually
enjoined as part of the ceremonial at these festivals of Bacchus; that it
was not only in accordance with public taste, but was consecrated as a
part of the national religion.... But the coarseness of Aristophanes is
not corrupting. There is nothing immoral in his plots, nothing really
dangerous in his broadest humour. Compared with some of our old English
dramatists, he is morality itself. And when we remember the plots of some
French and English plays which now attract fashionable audiences, and the
character of some modern French and English novels not unfrequently found
(at any rate in England) upon drawing-room tables, the least that can be
said is, that we had better not cast stones at Aristophanes."[3]
Moreover, it should be borne in mind that Athenian custom did not
sanction the presence of women--at least women of reputable character--at
these performances.
The particular plays, though none are free from it, which most abound in
this ribald fun--for fun it always is, never mere pruriency for its own
sake, Aristophanes has a deal of the old 'esprit gaulois' about him--are
the 'Peace' and, as might be expected from its theme, lending itself so
readily to suggestive allusions and situations, above all the
'Lysistrata.' The 'Thesmophoriazusae' and 'Ecclesiazusae' also take ample
toll in this sort of the 'risqué' situations incidental to their plots,
the dressing up of men as women in the former, and of women as men in the
latter. Needless to say, no faithful translator will emasculate his
author by expurgation, and the reader will here find Aristophanes'
Comedies as Aristophanes wrote them, not as Mrs. Grundy might wish him to
have written them.
These performances took place at the Festivals of Dionysus (Bacchus),
either the Great Dionysia or the minor celebration of the Lenaea, and
were in a sense religious ceremonials--at any rate under distinct
religious sanction. The representations were held in the Great Theatre of
Dionysus, under the slope of the Acropolis, extensive remains of which
still exist; several plays were brought out at each festival in
competition, and prizes, first and second, were awarded to the most
successful productions--rewards which were the object of the most intense
ambition.
Next to nothing is known of the private life of Aristophanes, and that
little, beyond the two or three main facts given below, is highly
dubious, not to say apocryphal. He was born about 444 B.C., probably at
Athens. His father held property in Aegina, and the family may very
likely have come originally from that island. At any rate, this much is
certain, that the author's arch-enemy Cleon made more than one judicial
attempt to prove him of alien birth and therefore not properly entitled
to the rights of Athenian citizenship; but in this he entirely failed.
The great Comedian had three sons, but of these and their career history
says nothing whatever. Such incidents and anecdotes of our author's
literary life as have come down to us are all connected with one or other
of the several plays, and will be found alluded to in the special
Introductions prefixed to these. He died about 380 B.C.--the best and
central years of his life and work thus coinciding with the great
national period of stress and struggle, the Peloponnesian War, 431-404
B.C. He continued to produce plays for the Athenian stage for the long
period of thirty-seven years; though only eleven Comedies, out of a
reputed total of forty, have survived.
A word or two as to existing translations of Aristophanes. These, the
English ones at any rate, leave much to be desired; indeed it is not too
much to say that there is no version of our Author in the language which
gives the general reader anything like an adequate notion of these Plays.
We speak of prose renderings. Aristophanes has been far more fortunate in
his verse translators--Mitchell, who published four Comedies in this form
in 1822, old-fashioned, but still helpful, Hookham Frere, five plays
(1871), both scholarly and spirited, and last but not least, Mr. Bickley
Rogers, whose excellent versions have appeared at intervals since 1867.
But from their very nature these cannot afford anything like an exact
idea of the 'ipsissima verba' of the Comedies, while all slur over or
omit altogether passages in any way 'risqué.' There remains only our old
friend 'Bohn' ("The Comedies of Aristophanes; a literal Translation by W.
J. Hickie"), and what stuff 'Bohn' is! By very dint of downright
literalness--though not, by-the-bye, always downright accuracy--any true
notion of the Author's meaning is quite obscured. The letter kills the
spirit.
The French prose versions are very good. That by C. Poyard (in the series
of "Chefs-d'oeuvre des Littératures Anciennes") combines scholarly
precision with an easy, racy, vernacular style in a way that seems
impossible to any but a French scholar.
The order here adopted for the successive plays differs slightly from
that observed in most editions; but as these latter do not agree amongst
themselves, this small assumption of licence appears not unwarrantable.
Chronologically 'The Acharnians' (426 B.C.) should come first; but it
seems more convenient to group it with the two other "Comedies of the
War," the whole trilogy dealing with the hardships involved by the
struggle with the Lacedaemonians and the longings of the Athenian people
for the blessings of peace. This leaves 'The Knights' to open the whole
series--the most important politically of all Aristophanes' productions,
embodying as it does his trenchant attack on the great demagogue Cleon
and striking the keynote of the author's general attitude as advocate of
old-fashioned conservatism against the new democracy, its reckless
'Imperialism' and the unscrupulous and self-seeking policy, so the
aristocratic party deemed it, of its accredited leaders.
Order, as thus rearranged, approximate date, and _motif_ (in brief) of
each of the eleven Comedies are given below:
'The Knights': 424 B.C.--eighth year of the War. Attacks Cleon, the
Progressives, and the War policy generally.